Henry Aubin: Tighter purse strings make sense

Henry Aubin, The Gazette11.20.2012

Henry Aubin

A fine example of the city's infrastructure issues, on rue de la Gauchetiere between Bleury and Beaver Hall Hill. Not only did the PQ's budget not give Montreal the extra $2 billion it was seeking for that purpose, it cut an additional $1.5 billion off the allotment.John Mahoney
/ The Gazette

MONTREAL — This week’s Quebec budget was ungenerous to the Montreal area. But I’m not complaining.

Yes, I know, it’s normal to scold when higher levels of government are stingy. But these aren’t normal times.

Testimony before the Charbonneau Commission demonstrates that the city of Montreal and many off-island suburbs have neither the integrity nor the competence to spend public money responsibly. Until they show they can, tighter provincial purse-strings make sense.

Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum is voicing dismay over infrastructure money in the Parti Québécois budget. The earlier Liberal government had planned on infrastructure expenditures averaging $11 billion a year for the next five years (much of which was to go to the Montreal area). Finance Minister Nicolas Marceau’s budget cuts this to $9.5 billion a year.

Montreal city hall and the Union des municipalités du Québec had sought an outright increase of $2 billion a year in infrastructure spending across the province, so Tuesday’s budget chops their dream by a hefty $3.5 billon.

A lot of people will deplore this cut. They’ll say:

“Look, our infrastructure is decaying. It needs repairs urgently.” Yes, but the government says the cutback won’t affect projects that really need attention such as the Turcot Interchange. Rather, the government’s hit-list affects such items of lesser priority as a new roof for the Olympic Stadium ($171 million) and the new hospital that would encourage urban sprawl just west of Montreal Island in Vaudreuil-Soulanges ($635 million).

“Montreal deserves a break. City hall’s new ways of dealing with public-works contracts two years ago shrank costs by 20 or 30 per cent.” But the status quo ante is creeping back. La Presse reported Tuesday, for example, that the sidewalk-construction cartel is again snaring sky-high contracts.

“Five years is a too long for a cutback.” Yet getting clean companies to emerge and for true competition to take hold will take time. It will take time, too, to replace all the rotten apples in the civil service with honest people.

“Quebec’s public finances can afford to cut Montreal some slack. Marceau produced a balanced budget for 2013-14, and he said that ‘as of next year, debt load as a percentage of GDP will begin to decline.’” But that’s quite uncertain. And, in any case, public sector debt, now by the far the biggest of any province at $251 billion, is increasing by $23 million per day, the Montreal Economic Institute says.

In other words, it’s not just some of our infrastructure that’s crumbling, it’s also public finances. We can’t fix the first at the expense of worsening the other — not if we want keep our credit rating, not if we want to avoid handing our descendants a toxic debt.

The lack of discipline in planning and executing infrastructure projects is glaring not only on the municipal front but also on the provincial: The costs of 20 of Quebec’s current major projects have soared by an average of 78 per cent over original estimates, according to the SECOR/KPMG study that the government published last week. (The new Dorval Circle, for example, is up 178-per-cent over the 2007 estimate and the CHUM hospital by a staggering 260 per cent — and the final bills are yet to come.)

So it’s really a sea change we need in this whole world of contracts.

Despite his displeasure over Quebec’s trimming of infrastructure loot, Applebaum showed sound instincts earlier when sworn in as mayor on Monday. In his inaugural speech, he didn’t follow the example of his predecessors by voicing a lofty vision of putting Montreal on the map. Instead, referring to corruption and collusion, he said, “I solemnly vow that I will erase this stain on our city.”

To that end, he sketched down-to-earth priorities. One was to maintain his seven-week freeze on approving public-works contracts if there were doubts about their integrity. He also used the occasion to press Quebec to expand the scope of its proposed law (Bill 1) to subject companies bidding for contracts of $50 million or more to integrity screening: He wants a lower threshold, since few Montreal contracts are so big.

Excellent. The sooner Montreal becomes truly responsible in dealing with contracts, the sooner it will deserve more infrastructure funds.

Montreal doesn’t need an interim mayor with a yen for razzle-dazzle. It needs one with steady vigilance — one who never says, as Gérald Tremblay so often did, “I didn’t know.”

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